J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345

DOI 10.1007/s10912-013-9236-6

The Deployment of Ethnographic Sciences

and Psychological Warfare During the Suppression
of the Mau Mau Rebellion

Marouf Hasian Jr.

Published online: 1 June 2013

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract This essay provides readers with a critical analysis of the ethnographic sciences
and the psychological warfare used by the British and Kenyan colonial regimes during the
suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. In recent years, several survivors of several detention
camps set up for Mau Mau suspects during the 1950s have brought cases in British courts,
seeking apologies and funds to help those who argue about systematic abuse during the
times of emergency. The author illustrates that the difficulties confronting Ndiku Mutua and
other claimants stem from the historical and contemporary resonance of characterizations of the
Mau Mau as devilish figures with deranged minds. The author also argues that while many
journalists today have commented on the recovery of lost colonial archives and the denials of
former colonial administrators, what gets forgotten are the polysemic ways that Carothers,
Leakey, and other social agents co-produced all of these pejorative characterizations. Kenyan
settlers, administrators, novelists, filmmakers and journalists have helped circulate the com-
mentaries on the Mau Mau mind that continue to influence contemporary debates about past
injustices.

Keywords Ethnopsychiatry . Mau Mau rebellion . J.C. Carothers . L. S. B. Leakey . Mutua case

During the spring of 2011, millions of readers around the world were presented with weekly
reports on the activities of four former Mau Mau veterans who had traveled to London so
that they could ask the British government for an official apology and the establishment of a
trust fund that would help the thousands of survivors back home who had suffered during the
1950s Kenyan Emergency. For several days, Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua, Paulo Nzili,
Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Mara testified in Britains High Court about the beatings,
the castrations, the rapes, and the other forms of abuse that had been suffered by some of
members of the Kikuyu communities who were detained as Mau Mau suspects.

J.D., Campbell University, 1984; Ph.D. in Speech Communication, University of Georgia, 1993
M. Hasian Jr. (*)
Department of Communication, University of Utah, 255 S. Central Campus Drive, Salt Lake City,
UT 84112, USA
e-mail: Marouf.Hasian@utah.edu
330 J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345

Although this would be the first of several hearings that would have to be held before final
legal decisions would be made about conducting a full-blown, British compensatory torts
proceeding, there is little question that these are significant cases that have much to tell us
about the histories, memories, and legal legacies that will be associated with the Kenyan
Emergency. Whatever the outcome of the substantive case for damages and apologies to
follow, argues Stephen Howe, the judgment promises to open a new era in Britains dealings
with its late-imperial history (2011).
The case of Mutau, Nzili, Nyingi, Mara, & Ngondi vs. The Foreign and Commonwealth
Office has divided public opinion in both the United Kingdom and Kenya,1 and there is no doubt
that the Mau Mau veterans have garnered substantial support among many journalistic and
academic communities. Peter Preston argued as early as 2005 that before there was Guantnamo
Bay and Abu Ghraib, there was Hola and Mwea and Manyani [three Emergency detention
camps] (2005). As far as Ben Macintyre was concerned, this was the barbaric face of the
British Empire (2011). Chris McGreal of Manchesters Guardian explained that the Kenya
Human Rights Commission had estimated that perhaps 160,000 people may have been held in
camps that were run by British colonial authorities or subalterns and that even the Foreign
Office doesnt deny there were torture and killings in the camps (2011). When Justice Richard
McCombe read the mounds of documentary evidence and heard some of the oral testimony of
the claimants in July of 2011, he kept the case alive by refusing to follow the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office (FCO) request for summary judgment because of the lack of a legal cause
of action or unlikelihood of presenting a successful case. McCombe explained that:

. . . I have not found that there was systematic torture in the Kenyan camps, nor that, if
there was, the UK Government is liable to detainees, such as the claimants, for what
happened. I have simply decided that these five claimants have arguable cases in law
and on the facts as presently known that there was such systematic torture and that the
UK Government is so liable. (2011)

McCombes decision was viewed as an early victory for the Mau Mau veterans because
legal representatives for the Foreign Office had raised a number of points in explaining why
the High Court need not find the government responsible in this situation, including claims
about the passage of time and the argument that Britains responsibility ended when the
Kenyan government gained independence in 1963.
Newly discovered archival materials were just a part of the alchemy of evidence that
was used in the Mau Mau cases for restorative justice, but as one historian has noted, this
trial really gained traction with the 2005 publication of several books on the Kenyan
Emergency years (Elkins 2011, 733). During that year, David Anderson (2005) had written
about some of the problematics of the colonial trials in Kenya that had resulted in the
hanging of roughly 1,000 Mau Mau suspects during those turbulent emergency years, and
Caroline Elkins (2005) complemented this scholarly research with an analysis of archives
and personal interviews that led her to believe that between 100,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu
may have died during the suppression of the Mau Mau. Their work received a great deal of
media and academic attention and contributed immensely to the study of the origins and
political usages of Mau Mau rhetorics.2
When legal inquires during the preparation stages of the Matua case led to the discovery of
some 300 boxes in the British archives that pertained to administrative policies during the
Kenyan emergency years, journalists could selectively cite some of this material as they wrote
about how both the British colonial secretary and the Kenyan governor seemed to have known
about some of these abuses. As one might imagine, all of this talk of British abuses and potential
J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345 331

cover ups did not sit well with audiences who remembered the emergency as a successful
counterinsurgency operation where alliances of loyalist Africans, colonial police, and British
soldiers had allegedly prevented even worse horrors.
In Kenya, at the same time that British journalists used materials from the archives to make
comments about shards of administrative memories, commentators were writing about the mental
warfare that had once been used to try and wipe out the Mau Mau (Mathangani 2011). Patrick
Mathangani of Nairobis Standard, for example, pointed out that the new released files were filled
with information about how colonial officials in the 1950s were trying to mentally break allegedly
psychopathic individuals. Mathangani (2011) elaborated by noting that some of the archival
memos revealed that detainees at hardcore camps were classified as Zs and locked up in most
inhuman conditions. One particular memo outlined some of the activities at the old Bahati
Resistance Movement Center where an official explained that some of this systematic abuse was
designed to form a void or vacuum in the victims mind. The unidentified official explained to his
superiors that the first measure that had to be used was to create fear about what was going on in the
camp, including rumours about occult powers that exist here and are practiced on their entry
(Mathangani 2011). Mathangani opined that this commentary on interrogation methods smacked
of racism, and while this particular official may not have condoned the usage of physical violence
he was nevertheless writing about superstitions, the use of ridicule, and strategies that could create
doubt and bewilderment in primitive minds. Europeans and their allies could use this
information as they interrogated detainees who would be asked to confess and reveal their Mau
Mau secrets (Mathangani 2011).
In this particular essay, I argue that the journalists and other observers who are now
writing about the Mutua case have entered a prefigurative ideological world that has been
co-produced by countless social actors who have written about the African mind or read
about the Mau Mau mind. One of my purposes involves the illustration of how certain
ideological of medical discoursesespecially ethnographic and psychological/psychiatric
rhetoricswere used to legitimize particular policy decisions during the Kenyan
Emergency. At the same time, I want to extend some of this analysis as I defend the more
controversial position that the legal, historical, and cultural legacies associated with key Mau
Mau mythologies continue to be factors in contemporary debates regarding postcolonial
apologies, restitution, and reparations. It will be my contention that some British officials
may offer their regrets, and they may listen attentively to some of the tales of suffering on the
part of the Mutua claimants, but in the end they also have to cope with the expectations of
constituencies who continue to believe in certain permutations of the old Mau Mau myths.
Today there is a transatlantic revival of interest in configuring Mau Mau veterans as
freedom fighters who were on the moral high ground when they helped oust the British from
Kenya, but as I note below, these claims have been, and will continue to be, contested by
several different legal, public, and cultural communities.
In many ways, a contemporary transvaluation has taken place as former Colonial and
British administrators who either knew about or condoned particular treatment of the Mau
Mau are now vilified for engaging in torturous colonial practices. For example, members of
some national and international presses often single out the social agency of individuals like
former Colonial Secretary of State Alan Lennox-Boyd or former Governor Evelyn Baring
when they write about the 1950s abuses and the presentist needs of the Mau Mau veterans,
and there is little question that these two administrators played key roles in the decisions that
were made during the Emergency years. However, I want to illustrate the fact that many
generations of authors and observers helped with the social construction of the particular
medicalized knowledge that was used to demonize the Mau Mau. In 1957, Peter Worsley,
one of the contemporary critics of Mau Mau mythologizing, noted that there were some
332 J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345

anthropologists and psychologists who worked hard at exposing some of the racist non-
sense disguised as scientific psychology which the Kenya government put out during the
Emergency that vilified the Mau Mau oath takers, but he was quick to point out that these
rhetorics still resonated with both conservatives and liberals of the period (1957, 22).
In order to help explain the multifaceted features of this specific form of recalcitrant Mau
Mau medical knowledgeand the continued rhetorical resonance of these figurationsthis
essay has been divided into five major segments. The first portion of the essay provides a brief
contextualization explaining some of the political, social, and economic factors that operated
between the 1920s and 1950s that set the stage for the discursive construction of the mythic Mau
Mau. The second section extends this analysis by highlighting how medical doctors,
ethnopsychiatrists3 and other scientists, argued about the maladies associated with African
brains or Mau Mau minds. The third section illustrates how administrators, police, rehabilita-
tors and soldiers used this information to help rid the Kenyan colony of these Mau Mau diseases,
while the fourth portion explains how many of these same arguments circulated in a host of
national and public spheres. Journalists, book authors, and even film producers used some of
these medicalized tropes to explain the existential dangers of diseased Kikuyu oath-takers.
Finally, in the conclusion, I explain how all of this pathologizing of the Mau Mau still influences
how contentious communities argue about past and present remembrances of the rebellion.

Contextualizing the pathologizing of the Mau Mau, 19291950

During the early 1900s, the opening of the Ugandan railway paved the way for waves of
European settler migrations, and many of the Kikuyu who lived in central parts of what
became known as the East Africa Protectorate had to deal with massive dislocation as they
made decisions about how to cope with foreign occupation. British ideas of colonial labour,
hut and poll tax systems, restricted mobility, and redistribution of precious farming land
influenced the relational dynamics of many facets of colonial life in the Protectorate. Native
reserves and the White Highlands were new regions carved out in the geographic
imaginations of the British colonizers. British governmental policy during these early years
was guided by the idea that the settler economy needed to work at becoming self-sufficient
and not a drain on the mother country, and this in turn meant that the indigenous populations
had their own apportioned duties and burdens (Green 1990, 70). Frank Furedi noted that up
until 19191920 many of the Kikuyu squatters who ended up laboring on European farms
had to work 3 to 4 months a year for the settlers. In return, they were allowed to raise their
sheep and goats, on areas that rarely exceeded 67 acres (1989). Some of the white settlers,
on the other hand, were provided with a thousand to hundreds of thousands of acres of land for
the development of the frontier. During the 1920s, any Kikuyu leaving the reserves had to
carry a pass, or kipande, that provided colonial authorities with biopolitical information about
that persons fingerprints and ethnic grouping (Elkins 2005, 16). Settlers put even more pressure
on colonial administrators as they passed new Resident Labourer Ordinances during in the
1930s that further limited the amount of land that squatters could farm (Kanago 1987, 97).
All of these legal and political decisions had massive social repercussions because they
impacted familial relations within Kikuyu communities, but for those who believed in the
transcendent powers of civilizing missions, these same acts could be rationalized as progressive
and liberal permutations of the British Empires informal or mandate approaches. After all,
in theory, the Natives well-being was still supposed to be of paramount importance to the
colonizers, and enlightened twentieth century wards had substituted incremental hegemonic
coercive practices in the place of outright displays of nineteenth century conquest mentalities. In
J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345 333

many ways, many of the measures that were taken that helped maintain white mans land in
Kenya were part of a dual rhetorical system that assumed that massive racial or developmental
differences existed between the laws that should govern whites in Whitehall or Nairobi and the
regulations that should be used for controlling the Kikuyu in Kenya.
These economic, legal, and political decisions were entangled with various scientific and
pseudo-scientific rationalizations for this differential treatment. The ethnographic construc-
tions of the Mau Mau had varied ideological origins and discursive roots, including the
lexicons of social evolution that were floating around during the inter-war years. As Caroline
Elkins has eloquently observed:

Settler self-interest was predicated on a sense of entitlement that resulted not only from
the shared aristocratic pedigree of many British immigrants but also from a perception
of profound racial superiority that infused every rung of the colonys white socioeco-
nomic ladder. . . . Many believed the African to be biologically inferior, with smaller
brain sizes, a limited capacity to feel pain or emotion, and even different nutrition
needs, requiring only a bowl of maize meal, or posho, to maintain their health. . . .
Virulent racist ideology grew more intense over time as the so called native was
moved along the racist spectrum from stupid, lazy, and childlike to savage, barbaric,
atavistic, and animal-like. This shift in characterization would correspond closely the
Africans increasing unwillingness to be exploited by the colonial economy, and with
their desire to reclaim land they considered to be rightfully their own.4 (2005, 12)

Social constructions of the Kikuyu were thus inextricably tied to colonial scientific claims
that were made regarding ethnic categorizations, differential maturation rates, mental abilities,
political capacities, and even emotive responses to what was then called detribalization.
By the end of World War II, a growing Kikuyu intelligentsia realized that there were
decolonization rumblings across Africa and around the globe, and returning African veterans
who fought for the British against the Axis powers joined in the heated disputes that were
already taking place between settlers, administrators, and African leaders who all had
conflicting notions regarding land reform, political disenfranchisement, and racial entitle-
ments. Jomo Kenyatta, a moderate constitutionalist (who would later find himself identified
as one of the demagogues who brought on the Mau Mau affliction), would write a
pamphlet in 1945 that explained to British readers that Africans make their claim to justice
now, in order that a bloodier and more destructive justice may not be inevitable in time to
come (Kenyatta 1945, 22, cited in Berman 1976, 160). Oaths that were taken by workers
union representatives or political parties in Kenya bound together communities and in-
dividuals who sought ways of recovering their dignity and their lands. This, however, was
not the way that many whites, Christian Kikuyu, missionaries, or others would write about
oathing.
During the 1940s and early 1950s, sporadic violence in Kenya was characterized as a
colonial emergency when dozens of settlers and hundreds of colonial supporters lost their lives
during bloody raids. Just days after Governor Barings declaration of a state of emergency, the
colonial government issued this statement which explicitly linked the taking of what were
called the Mau Mau oaths to the radical politics of the 1940s Kikuyu organizations:

Mau Mau is a secret Society confined almost entirely to the Kikuyu tribe. It seems
clear that it is a recrudescence of a society known as the Kikuyu Central Association
which was proscribed for subversive activities in 1940. It has been resuscitated by
Africans desirous of achieving a form of African tyranny (with Kikuyu dominance)
334 J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345

and personal power through the exploitation of tribal feeling and superstition. It
encourages race hatred and is virulently anti-European and anti-Christian in character.
It pursues its aims by forcible administration of secret oaths to men, women and
children, and by the intimidation of witnesses and law-abiding Africans. It resorts to
methods of a most brutal and inhuman kind, including murder, the mutilation of
bodies, arson and the maiming of domestic animals. This subversive society has
attracted to it the worst criminals in the Kikuyu tribe, and it is held in abhorrence by
responsible members of all races. (Clough 1988, 34)

Many British subjects and colonial administrators were convinced that drastic measures
had to be taken, and the Kikuyu communities were supposed to renounce this oathing before
any real rehabilitation, racial harmony, political enfranchisement or economic growth in the
colony could take place. Colonel Ewart Grogan, a Member of the Legislative Council,
addressed a meeting of the Kenya British Empire in a Nairobi assembly hall, and he received
enthusiastic cheers when he declared the whole Kikuyu tribe needed to feel a psychic shock
(Padmore 1953, 370).

Colonial ethnography and curing the ills of the Mau Mau mind, 19521960

In 1996, Raymond Prince argued in Transcultural Psychiatry that decades before the
Kenyan Emergency, several African researchers had already provided some of the first
criticisms of colonial prejudices in psychiatry . . . (1996, 230). Jomo Kenyatta, for example,
sarcastically wrote during the 1930s about the hegemony and alleged cultural costs of some
of these paternalistic practices:

. . . professional friends of the African . . . are prepared to maintain their friendship for
eternity as a sacred duty, provided only the African will continue to play the part of an
ignorant savage so that they can monopolise the office of interpreting his mind and
speaking for him. To such people, an African who writes a study of this kind is
encroaching on their preserves. He is a rabbit turned poacher.5 (1938, xviii, cited in
Prince 1996, 231)

Years later, the Nigerian ethnopsychiatrist, Thomas Adeoye Lambo, complained in 1955
that Carothers views on African personality simply glorified pseudo scientific novels or
anecdotes with a subtle racial bias, in ways that can no longer be seriously presented as
valuable observations of scientific merit (1955, 3, cited in Prince 1996, 231).
Yet in spite of these early critiques, colonial contexts and psychiatric texts could be
sutured together in what some have called the commandeering of psychiatry to support
colonialist prejudices (Prince 1996, 230).6 As noted below, both racists and reformers could
join together and believe that the Mau Mau oath represented a pernicious form or mass
psychosis, evidence of diseased brains that needed colonial intervention. Given the fact that
many whites in Kenya believed that decolonization would not take place for decades and the
1950s perceptions that Mau Mau leaders were brainwashing the Kikuyu people through
their mystical usage of oathing, it made sense that authorities in London and Nairobi would
look for scientific help at the same time that they called in the troops. They found this needed
help when they decided to incorporate into their planning some of the ideas that came from
two people that theyand many othersthought were some of the leading experts on the
African mind.7
J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345 335

These two scientists, J.C. Carothers and L.S.B. Leakey, were members of many
rehabilitation committees in Kenya, and both of them were considered to be seasoned
men on the spot who lived and worked with the indigenous communities in Kenya.
Leakey self-identified himself as a white African elder of the Kikuyu tribe who was
known for his archaeological and ethnographic work (1937),8 while Carothers was
asked to write manuscripts for the World Health Organization (1953) and the Kenyan
colonial authorities (1955).
During the 1930s, Carothers had helped found the East African Psychiatric School
in Kenya, and although he had little formal training in psychiatry (and even less in
psychology), he was touted as an expert in ethnopsychiatry (Keller 2001, 307; Payne 2011).
Carothers scientific discourse, argued Elkins, employed terms like normal and pathological to
describe groups of people, terms which corresponded rather neatly with racial catego-
ries whereby whites were always the definition of normal against which pathological
blacks were defined and therefore analyzed by colonial psychiatrists (2005, 106).
Frantz Fanon, one of Carothers contemporaries, ridiculed this ethnopsychiatrists
characterization of the normal African as someone who might be on par with a
lobotomized European (1968, 245).
Yet Kenyan authorities were convinced that this was much more than pseudo-science,
and their official history that was produced before decolonizationFrank Corfields
Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of the Mau Mau (1960)has been cited as
primary or secondary evidence by generations of writers. Moreover, as Dane Kennedy
argued in 1992, the work of Carothers and other social agents who pathologized the Mau
Mau became a part of some dense social constructions that tapped into both settler myths
regarding primitivism as well as liberal paternalistic myths that hoped for the rehabilitation
of Mau Mau minds (1992, 242252).
From a rhetorical vantage point, the texts that would be produced by both Carothers
and Leakey provided a variety of settlers and administrators with the scientific argu-
ments that they needed to justify their treatment of the Kikuyu and the purging of the
Mau Mau horrors. In Carothers The Psychology of the Mau Mau (1955), he included
passages near the end that could have been used by those who wanted more equitable
social legislation, but other parts of this work were filled with cultural and psycholog-
ical explanations that outlined the problems associated with the Kikuyu or Mau Mau
minds.
For example, he argued that the hasty imposition of modernist ideas from Europe had
contributed to the rapid destabilization of Africans who were now engaging in vile activities
(1955, 24). After the declaration of the Kenyan Emergency, many former squatters and the
poor of Nairobi had fled to the forests of central Kenya, and the book that Carothers wrote
for the Kenya government commented on forest psychology that came from overly
suspicious and secretive minds (1955, 45). This blurring of material realities and academic
musings became a part of colonial epistemes and archives.
Leakey could contribute to this psychologizing by buttressing Carothers claims with
detailed analysis that came from his own ethnographic research. He viewed the administra-
tion of the Mau Mau oath as a perversion of traditional Kikuyu practices, and his commen-
taries on de-oathing helped with the rationalizations that were made when critics of the
Kenyan camps or villagization programs complained about particular coercive practices.
Leakey (1953) constantly argued that Kenyatta and other radicals were poisoning the minds
of the Kikuyu, and he often told readers who read his materials that he was trying to explain
to them the complex nature of the Mau Mau rituals. As the next section notes, Leakey was
not alone as he worried about all of this oathing.
336 J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345

Administrating, policing, rehabilitating, and fighting the diseased Mau Mau minds,
19521960

In the aftermath of the Governor Barings declaration of an emergency during the fall of
1952, hundreds of Kikuyu leaders were rounded up for interrogation and detention.
Administrators were hoping that separating these rabble rousers from the rest of the
Kikuyu communities would cut down on the number of oath takers. However, some of this
boundary work failed when thousands of Kikuyu left the poverty of Nairobi and the
repressions on the reserve so that they could join the radical resistance in the forests of
Central Kenya. For more than a year, the Mau Mau rebels fought a bloody guerrilla camp
against the settlers and the colonial government, and when British troops were called in, the
civilian administrators waged their own psychological war against the Kikuyu. Authorities
sutured together some of the academic wisdom that came from the work of Carothers and
Leakey with the grounded counterinsurgency folk wisdom that came from previous British
campaigns in Palestine and Malaya. In order to help break the resistance and cure the
afflicted Kikuyu, they set up an elaborate colonial apparatus that used raids, screening
processes, detentions, trials, expulsions, and penal communities as a way of separating the
Africans who could be more easily rehabilitated from the hard core Mau Mau who may
have taken six to seven types of bestial Mau Mau oaths. In theory, those who experienced
multiple oathing sessions were the ones who posed the greatest threats to the colony.
The geographic imaginaries of these white colonial administrators and their loyal Kikuyu
supporters encouraged them to be convinced that either various types of liberal reformist regimes
or conservative colonial practices could break the mystical powers of the oaths. White settlers
who had witnessed some of the horrors of the early Mau Mau raids on the White Highlands were
calling for summary judgment and vengeance, while colonial authorities in London and Nairobi
circulated rhetorics filled with commentary on the need for restraint and the curative powers of
rehabilitation programs. While these commentators often disagreed about the exact methods
that should be used in coping with Mau Mau minds, they shared the concern that these many
Kikuyu and other ethnic communities in Kenya were plagued by radicalized oath-takers.
Rehabilitation discourses were omnipresent, protean, and polysemic, and even those
British administrators who had the best of intentions and were seeking non-violent solutions
to the supposed Mau Mau problem were dealing with financial constraints, boisterous
settlers, aggrieved Kikuyu populations, and the racist politics of colonial regimes that
refused to give credence to the idea that the Kikuyu communities had any real complaints.
Some of the same settlers and loyalist Kikuyu who had watched the murder of their friends
and neighbors were now put in charge of the screening, detention camps, and villagization
processes that some contend led to somewhere between 50,000 and 300,000 deaths.
Between 1952 and 1960, thousands of administrators used an array of strategiesincluding
religious conversions, de-oathing sessions, enticements, beatings, and even torture as they
sought to break the Mau Mau. Leakeys books were distributed to hundreds of Kenyan police
officers, and his work was cited by many of the reformists who worked at the network of more
than 50 camps that dotted the Central Kenyan landscape. Some of those who screened or
interrogated Kikuyu suspects believed that their own field experience and living conditions
provided them with a type of intuitive psychological wisdom that could help them tell the
difference between those who could truly be rehabilitated and the irremediable hard core that
had to be sent off to desolate locations. Historians and other interdisciplinary scholars contend
that as many as 90 % of the 1.5 million Kikuyu who lived during this period may have taken at
least one of the Mau Mau oaths, and over time the vast majority ended up confessing so that
they could end the pain or return to their families.
J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345 337

In a plethora of ways, the colonial emergency system that was set up during these years was
socially constructed in ways that were tailored toward efficiently rehabilitating the Mau Mau so
that they could go back to work for the settlers and the gentrified Kikuyu loyalists. When the
British militarys 1954 Operation Anvil led to the roundup of thousands of suspects in Nairobi,
the psychological war escalated as hooded informed helped identify those who would be given
black, grey or white cards. These cards became the manifest symbols of the alleged
psychological states of the Mau Maus, and their referential nature was an important part of the
symbolism of rehabilitation. As Elkins explains:

Askwith [Thomas Askwith, Commissioner of the Community Development Program]

termed the system of detention and rehabilitation the Pipeline, denoting a Mau Maus
adherents progression from initial detention through ever more benevolent rehabili-
tation activities to ultimate release. The process would begin at the transit camps,
where teams of Europeans and Africans would screen and classify each Mau Mau
suspect. Those considered white would be repatriated to the African reserves; those
labeled grey or black would be considered to the reception centers, also known as
holding camps. Screening would continue, and those still considered grey would be
moved along to the work camps, where detainees would confess their oaths voluntarily. . . .
Those classified, as black, however, were destined for the special detention camps. These
camps would hold the hard core and the politicals, most of whom were considered beyond
redemption. (2005, 109)

Cards were used to catalogue these designations, and this classification system not only
provided connotations of ones psychological state, but opened or closed the door to the
limited freedoms that were available to those who were deemed deoathed and thus able to
return to the colonial polity. Those suspects who were given black cards had to go through
the worst of horrors because they were considered those with the most damaged Mau Mau
minds, and most of the colonial records that have recently been rediscovered give us some
clues of how administrators were conversing about how to deal with the criticisms that
occasionally attracted the attention of members of Parliament or imperial publics.
While Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale have argued that Leakey did not create Mau Mau
and that social anthropologists or ethnologists should not be blamed for the ideological de-
ployments of their rhetorics (1991, 192), it could be argued that their scientific or pseudo
scientific work reflected and refracted the liberal and conservative prejudices of their ages.
Moreover, Berman and Lonsdale may have underestimated the potent power of these rhetorics,
where talk of breaking the Mau Mau through the use of compelling force was also used to
provide legal cover for those engaged in abusive activities. In 1955, Governor Baring granted
amnesties to those who engaged in some of these activities, which provides further evidence of
colonial anxieties regarding possible violations of Geneva Convention proscriptions on torture
or the systematic usage of coercive labor. As Peter Worsley explained, the defeat of the Mau
Mau was a double victorya victory over the armed resistance of the Africans, and a victory in
persuading the world that Mau Mau was an atavistic savage cult (1957, 15).
The memoirs that were written during the late 1950s and early 1960s and the contemporary
records that have been collected from hundreds of Kikuyu survivors provide us with ample
proof of the perceived horrors of these camps and the contested nature of the remembrances that
we have of the pipeline. Before the 2005 publication of David Andersons book on prob-
lematic hangings and Elkins commentaries on the horrors of the camps, it is fair to say that
many academics often took at face value the idea that for the most part, the British systemwith
all of its imperfectionslooked nothing like Leopold IIs Belgian Congo (Hochschild 1998) or
338 J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345

the annihilation of the Herero in Germanys Southwest Africa. A great deal of this amnesia can be
linked to either the vilification of the oathed Mau Mau or an underestimation of the role that all of
this psychologizing related to the curing of the Kikuyu played throughout the 19521960 period.
Askwiths pipeline was the social manifestation of all of this psychologizing, a
thanatopolitical device that wreaked havoc when these instrumentalities were placed in the
hands of racists and others who implemented these policies. Neal Aschersona former
member of a nationalist party in Ugandaexplained just why the work of Leakey and
Carothers resonated with so many during the Emergency:

These ideas were welcomed. They settlers, not usually keen on intellectuals, were
delighted that the psycho docs had seen the point. Their houseboys [sic] who took
up the gun and the panga were not bothered about land rights but were simply off their
tiny heads, sick primitives under Satanic possession. Oliver Lyttelton, a normally
suave Tory grandee who was colonial secretary at the start of Mau Mau, recalled that
as I wrote memoranda or instructionsabout Mau Mau] . . . I could suddenly see a
shadow fall across the pagethe horned shadow of the Devil himself. (2011)

While conservatives and racists could argue that these were inherent human flaws, the
liberal reformists could advocate more curative approaches. Sadly, both of these epistemic
formations could be used to rationalize the dispensation of coercive colonial violence.
The pipeline was more than just a name that Askwith gave to some theoretical
systemit played a key role in the money that was expended, the commentaries that
were sent between London and Nairobi, the rehabilitative rhetorics that were used to fend off
critics, and the formation of the colonizers own psyches as they justified the use of force that
would never have been condoned or sanctioned in Europe.
There is plenty of blame that could be apportioned as we see how all of this pipeline
reformist rhetoric was actually co-produced and operationalized in military, legal, and civilian
processes that categorized, screened, detained, and brutalized the lives of so many hundreds and
thousands of Kikuyu and other Kenyans. In theory, as long as they were under the spell of Mau
Mau oaths, the suspects belonged in the realm of what Giorgio Agamben has called Homo
Sacer, the outcasts who could be dehumanized or killed with impunity (1998).
Even those who survived the pipeline and returned home found that Kenyattas Kenya was a
place now populated by those who wished to talk about future unities and not the past
grievances of the Mau Mau. While some white settlers sold their land and fled to South
Africa or Europe, others stayed and were allowed to keep hundreds of thousands of acres.
Royalist Kikuyu became key leaders in the new government, and it is no coincidence that they
could also help police the archives, the memories, and the histories of the emergency years.
These are some of the reasons why all of the psychologizing that went on during those
years has either been trivialized, contained, or domesticated, as contemporary communities
forget about the discursive origins and pervasiveness of the labeling that went into the
movement of hundreds and thousands of Kikuyu up and down imaginary socially evolu-
tionary ladders of imperial progress. While Labour leaders in England or Quaker critics
complained about the brutalities of those who operated the pipeline, colonial administrators
found no shortage of other audiences who were willing to believe that no systematic abuse
could ever blight the landscapes of British imperialist ventures. The success stories of
rehabilitation and efficacious counterinsurgency became dominant morality tales and the
stuff of legend as generations looked back on Kenyan Emergency as a regrettable, defensive,
necessary and understandable occurrence given the horrors perpetrated by those who carried
around Mau Mau minds.
J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345 339

Near the end of decolonization, colonial files were burned, and new rhetorics were
deployed as all of this racism and psychologizing was forgotten in the reformist narratives
that insistently and consistently contained arguments about how any colonial abuse was
either perpetrated by the colonial natives (i.e. unsupervised Kikuyu royalists, mercenaries
from Uganda, etc.), or the Mau Maus themselves. After all, dont the colonial archives
contain records of Colonial Secretaries decrying the use of violence, and arent there memos
that remind us that at least some colonizers were interested in the dispensation of justice in
isolated cases of abuse? All of this provided local administrators with positive proof of
lessons learned, and the efficacy of rehabilitation.
The presence or absence of colonial records has become just a small part of the
ideological commentaries that have dotted academic and political rhetorical landscapes.
For the most part, generations of scholars have agreed that the publicity surrounding the
Hola incident in 1959where dozens of detainees were killed or injuredhelped spur the
nationalist movement toward Kenyan independence. By that time, 5 years had passed
since the British military forces had effectively ended any organized open resistance, and
only a few hundred die-hard Mau Mau resisters were being held in the camps. Settlers who
had dreamed of a white Kenya that would be built along the lines of their South African
comrades or Rhodesian neighbors or liberal reformers who thought that decolonization was
more than a dozen years away were shocked to find that Joma Kenyatta would be anointed
the moderate leader of a newly minted nation that would be led by African majorities.
In the aftermath of the emergency and the formation of Kenyattas Kenya, there would be
heated academic and political exchanges regarding the histories and memories that would be
associated with the origins and suppressions of the Mau Mau rebellion, and some of those
who fought physical battles now waged memory wars. While a few memoirs were written by
Mau Mau survivors, it would be the victors who produced the official histories that be used
by those who surveyed the London or Nairobi archives. The allegedly definitive history of
the Mau Maua work that is still cited todaywas produced by F.D. Corfield. This
fascinating text not only paints a hagiographic picture of the insights of both Carothers
and Leakeybut also anticipates some of the arguments of those who might produce
sharper critiques of the Emergency years. Like many of his colleagues, Corfield worried
about the potential revival of the Mau Mau, and he explained to readers what happened
when administrations were too reformist or too lenient. Corfield spent almost 3 years
working on his Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of the Mau Mau, and in his
authoritative work he explained to readers:

It has been suggested that had the hand of co-operation been given to Jomo Kenyatta,
history would have taken a different turn, and there would have been no Mau Mau.
But all the evidence points otherwise. . . without the freedom afforded them by a
liberal Government, Jomo Kenyatta and his associates would have been unable to
preach their calculated hymn of hate and to exploit, through the medium of perverted
witchcraft and intimidation, the almost inevitable grievances which must accompany
the rapid evolution of a primitive society. Can anyone imagine what kind of African
State would have arisen in Kenya on the foundation of Mau Mau, which sought to
eliminate all non-African influence, and which, by unspeakable debauchery of its
oaths, achieved the terrible result of breaking and debasing the dignity of thousands of
human souls? (1960, 3; Clough 1998, 39)

In theory, Kenyan authorities had been firm but fair, and their deoathing practices could
be historically remembered as successful imperial achievements that were produced by
340 J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345

selfless reformers who knew that alleged complaints about land or lack of equality were
themselves evidence of pathological psychological states. It would difficult to find a more
tautological, and delusional, defense of some aspects of the British civilizing mission.

Literary and visual representations of the Mau Mau, 19531965

While many researchers have provided us with some insightful analysis that comes out of
the archives in Nairobi or London, what often gets neglected are analyses that remind us of
how much of this psychologizing also circulated in the mundane, vernacular world of those
who read novels or saw movies that were filled with visual representations that brought to
life the horrors of the Mau Mau mind.
Thousands of readers who may have never read Carothers analysis or Leakeys texts
could nevertheless read other popular novels that came from settlers who either cited their
work or wrote about related topics. While the Mau Mau survivors produced only a few
works before the late 1960s, the settlers and others who remembered the Emergency years
filled discursive horizons with books that transported readers temporarily and topographi-
cally back to the Kenyan White Highlands so that they could visualize the aesthetic beauty
and the determination of those who stood up to the horrors that were perpetrated by Mau
Mau leaders, the squatters that turned on their benefactors, and the riff-raff from the urban
areas who now waged war against unprepared or innocent whites.
In the visual iconography that was produced by settler novelists and others who wrote
about the dangers of Mau Mau, former laborers were portrayed as devilish figures who
fingered their panga, or sharp farming blades, as they prepared to murder their benefactors.
Wilsons Kenyas Warning (1954) pictured this on a blood-red dustcover, and other novels
and publications warned readers about the dangers that came from lack of preparedness. The
Mau Mau uprising was characterized as a revolt of the domestic staff . . . It was as though
Jeeves had taken to the Jungle (Greene 1980, 188; Lonsdale 1990, 407). In one book,
readers could see images of the bloodstained bed of a 6-year old who had been murdered,
and readers were told of how doctors who once treated squatters were attacked as well
(Wilson 1954, 56). In many of these novels, the minds of the Mau Mau were said to be
hopelessly defective, leading them to engage in atavist behaviors that would only be
emboldened by the appeasing strategies put forward by misguided reformists.
Perhaps the most famous of all of the fictional works about Mau Mau produced in the 1950s
was Robert Ruarks Something of Value (1955). This book remained in print for more than a
dozen years, and its major plot lines centered around the challenges that confronted two friends,
Peter, a settlers son, and Kimani, a squatters son. While Peter had to deal with the ravages of a
Mau Mau attack on his home, Kimani ventured to Nairobi where he lived in the slums that gave
birth to a movement. Ruark, who had earned a reputation as a successful journalist and novelist
spent years of research before he wrote Something of Value, and he indicated that had profited
from reading the works of Elspeth Huxley, Leakey, and Jomo Kenyatta. This allegedly non-
political novel took for granted that Mau Mau was a symptomatic ulcer of the evil and unrest
which afflicted the world at that time (1955, iii). In a number of different ways, Ruarks
Something of Value offered readers graphic portrayals of the violence in Kenya that mirrored the
more clinical and official claims that were circulating in scientific works and administrative
memos on the Mau Mau. For example, the Kikuyu were presented as primitive Africans who
had been corrupted by Western influences, and this in turn made them psychological susceptible
when they listened to agitation that came from leaders like Jomo Kenyattaallegedly the leader
of some fictional Kenya Provincial Association. The orgiastic violence (Clough 1998, 38)
J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345 341

in the book included scenes of a batuni oath-taking ceremony that supposedly involved
decapitation and a portrayal of a settler farmhouse in the aftermath of a Mau Mau attack. The
batuni ceremony was often depicted as a ritual that involved the oathing of the hard core.
Lonsdale has described Something of Value as a blood-curdling book (1990, 407),
and he highlighted the imagery of one of the last scenes when Kimani leaves the
forest with gun in hand, and audiences read: This time Kimani was going home.
Ruarks fictional work garnered the attention of movie producers who circulated a 1957
film version of Something of Value, starring Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier. Millions could
see the brief introduction by Winston Churchill (Clough 1998, 38) before being presented
with the visual horrors of the Mau Mau hordes. Churchills presence provided audiences
with reassurances that Whitehall stood behind the settlers and Kenyan administrators.
It would take many generations before Kenyan and British audiences were willing to
believe in various academic and public critiques that did more than demonize the Mau Mau.
As Evan Mwangi explained in 2010, although the dominant Kenyan imaginary today
presents Mau Mau as the ultimate symbol of ordinary peoples bravery and resolve to wrest
power from colonialists toward ultimate political self-determinationan image found
especially in the fictions of Ngugi wa Thiongo and the writings of historians Mukaru
Nganga and Maina wa Kinyattithis transition did not take place overnight (2010, 8788).9
The Kikuyu loyalists who fought with the British were the ones who gained power in Kenya
after Independence, and both the governments of Jomo Kenyetta (19631978) and Daniel Arap
Moi (19782002) tried to suppress the narratives of the radical Mau Mau as the embodiment of
the struggle for Kenyan nationhood (2010, 92). Until 2003, bans were placed on some Mau
Mau veterans gatherings, and as Daniel Branch explains, the Mau Mau discourse became an
oppositional rhetoric, one that could be embraced by critics of either historical or contemporary
policies who found a mirror to hold up against the growing prevalence of official corruption and
the declining opportunities to express discontent within formal political institutions (2009, xii).
As a result of all of this contestation, we have been left with competing and contested
representations of the Mau Mau, and these figurations are still tied to many emotional and
cognitive rhetorical framings of the Kenyan Emergency years. The revival of interest in valorizing
the Mau Mau as freedom fighters must compete with other vectors of historical memories.

Conclusions

Throughout this essay, I have given readers some sense of the reasons why Mutua and the other
Mau Mau survivors will have a hard time winning their court case and why Mathangani ran
across those strange psychological characterizations of the Emergency detainees. From a legal
standpoint, Justice McCombes July 21, 2011 summary of some of the first hearings in the case
made it clear that he was not yet issuing a finding of any systematic torture. Moreover, he
underscored the point that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office could later argue in a separate
hearing that Mau Mau claims were barred by the Limitations Act of 1980, which indicated that
most personal injury cases needed to be presented within a 3 year window (McCombe 2011).
Even after McCombes ruling, The Foreign Office Minister for Africa, Henry Bellingham,
indicated that the Government would continue to argue about time lapses as well as raise
complex constitutional questions (Macintyre, Ralph, and McConnell 2011). What complicates
matters is the fact that while some of the elder Mau Mau veterans simply want an apology or an
acknowledgment of their history, the Matua proceedings are just some of the test cases that could
open the floodgates for further litigation. Tens of thousands of Kikuyu survivors have joined
various causes in Kenya, and a few members of Mau Mau Original Trust Officials indicate that
342 J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345

they are seeking some 140 trillion shillings in compensation (BBC 2011). The joint tortfeasors
in the casethe individuals who carried out particular activities in the detention camps or their
supervisors, or the state entities named in these casescould end up suing each other in order to
avoid liability. This would get even more complicated if loyalist Kikuyu or other ethnic groups in
Kenya started to counter-sue the Mau Mau for their own Emergency grievances.
At the same time, while academic critiques of some of this psychologizing has put a dent in
scholarly acceptance of the Mau Mau myths, there are still many publics who continue to
circulate some of the very same arguments that were used at the time of the Kenyan Emergency.
Even today, a cursory review of some of the commentary that can be found in the pages of the
United Kingdoms Daily Mail or Manchesters Guardian illustrates the continued resonance of
those pseudo-scientific commentaries that went into the production of the discourses that
focused on the Mau Mau mind. For example, at the same time that the Mau Mau survivors
were preparing their cases for Britains high court, Tony Rennell was asking readers why the
Mau Mau butchers werent also in the dock? (2011). In a commentary that mentioned some
of the very same cases and headlines that appeared more than a half century ago when
newspapers carried postmortem photos of those who were hacked to death by Mau Mau
insurgents (Elkins 2005, 43), Rennell brought up the case of Roger Ruck and other settlers
who were murdered during these turbulent years. In his telling of the tale, readers learned about
the Mau Mau oath that involved the sacrifice and disemboweling of goats, the superstitions of
the Kikuyu, the burying alive of Christians who stood in their way, and the fact that no Mau
Mau veterans had ever been prosecuted for the torture and murder of loyal Kenyans.
A selective sampling taken from some of the hundreds of other commentaries that were
published in the wake of an April 2011 Guardian editorial shows that many defenders of the
British colonial days still believe in various permutations of the myths of Mau Mau
pathologies (Guardian Editorial Board 2011). The comments were rated according to
number of hits on recommendations, and the following examples provide us with hints of
what audiences today think about the historical legacies of the Mau Mau.

& The Empires default setting was not brutality. As can be seen by the fact that these
attacks by the Mau Mau were so unexpected and so was the colonial governments
response. (MoveAnyMountain, 4/11/11, after Guardian Editorial Board 2011)
& What were the Colonial administrators responding to? How did the colonial administrators
come to see their brutality as necessary or right? (thefrolickinging mole, 4/11/11, after
Guardian Editorial Board 2011)
& These peoples allegations are just that. Allegations. So do not report them as fact.
(Enguerrand321, 4/11/11, after Guardian Editorial Board 2011)
& This was a tribal insurrection in anticipation of independence, whereby one tribe decided
to grab as much land as possible . . . . I see no case for a humiliating apology. . .
(SoundMoney, 4/11/11, After Guardian Editorial Board 2011)
& When will the Mau Mau take responsibility for the massacres they perpetrated during the
uprising, when will we hear a contrite apology for the Lari massacre and other atrocities?
. . . (rufushound, 4/11/11, after Guardian Editorial Board 2011)
& I suppose no one ever mentions the unspeakable barbaric deaths suffered by British men,
women and children at the hands of the Mau Mau because they were too unbearable to
contemplate. (driffle01, 4.11/11, after Guardian Editorial Board 2011)

Elsewhere, commentaries on the Mutua case characterized the Mau Mau as bloodthirsty
murders, an evil terrorist organization, killers who ensured that the innocent were the
first to be horrifyingly and painfully murdered (Comments after Waihenya 2010).
J Med Humanit (2013) 34:329345 343

All of this makes clear that educators and other critics need to continually (re)
emphasize the complex nature of the social, ethnographic, political, economic, psy-
chological and legal issues that led up to the Mau Mau rebellion and the passage of Kenyan
emergency legislation.

Endnotes
1 For an excellent summary of the individual tort claims regarding assault, battery, and negligence in these
cases on the part of Mutua and the other Mua Mau claimants, see Anderson (2011).
For examples of attacks on the case from British commentators, see the comments following Daily Mail
Reporter (2011). Some commentators typically argued that lawyers were just taking advantage of the
Kenyan claimants, that journalists and others were forgetting about the beneficence of the British empire,
that the Mau Mau ought to be counter-sued for their horrific acts of violence, and that if reparations were
allowed in types of situations than readers needed to remember about the horrors of the Irish Famine,
foreign invasions, etc. Contrast this with one Kenyan claim that coverage of the case in the British
mediaacross the ideological spectrumhas been both extensive and supportive (Wanyeki 2011, para-
graph 10). Ben Macintyre explains some of the political and cultural context of some of these debates in
Africa when he notes that the reparations claim is regarded in Kenya as nationally divisive since the Mau
Mau was in large part an ethnic rebellion by Kikuyu rather than a national uprising. Most of the alleged
torture and abuse was carried out by Africans of other tribes, albeit under British supervision, adding a
potentially toxic tribal element to the mixture (Macintyre 2011, paragraph 34).
2 Beginning in the 1960s, scholars have produced a steady stream of essays and books trying to explain or
deconstruct various facets of the Mau Mau myth. For just some of the representative samples of this work,
see (Rosberg and Notthingham 1966), (Barnett and Njama 1966), (Buijtenhuijs 1973), (Buijtenhuijs 1982),
(Throup 1987), (Kanogo 1987), (Furedi 1989), (Berman and Lonsdale 1991), (Presley 1992), (Berman and
Lonsdale 1992), (Clough 1998).
3 I realize that the labeling or a critique of a field known as ethnopsychiatry is fraught with controversy. So
is its alleged demise as a fieldsee (McCulloch 1995). Cristiana Giordano, who has conducted fieldwork in
an ethnopsychiatric clinic in Northern Italy, traces some of ethnopsychiatrys legacy back to the works of
several colonial doctors, including John Colin Carothers (Giordano 2011, 229).
4 For a detailed discussion of how these racial typologies were used in the eugenical discourses that circulated
in Kenya during this period, see (Campbell 2007).
5 Obviously, the various ideological, cultural, and political entanglements of anthropologyand anthropol-
ogists criticism of various imperial or colonial usages of particular disciplinary practiceshas a long and
complex history dating back at least to the time of the Enlightenment (Vincent, 2002).
6 Prince further argues that when Jack McCulloch and others write about this commandeering, this is a stance
that would be accepted by most (Prince 1996, 230). At the end of his article he reminds us that our
recollections of this difficult past for transcultural psychiatry are influenced by such notions as conscious-
ness, mind, free will, and responsibility, and that radical shifts in opinions on these intangibles mean that in
this field, opinions that are politically correct today may tomorrow be anathema (238).
7 For an excellent analysis of some of the rhetorical constructions that circulated in Kenya and other parts of
the British Empire during this period, see (McCulloch 1995).
8 For some of the best critiques of Leakeys claims, see (Clark 1989), (Berman and John Lonsdale 1990),
(Kershaw 1997). For samples of Leakeys classic work on the Mau Mau, see (Leakey 1952, 1954).
9 As Elisha Stephen Atieno-Odhiambo explain, Kenyatta spoke first, then lived long, and one of the
consequences of his longevity is that he put a lid on indigenous Gikuyu production of history, folklore and
anthropology (Atieno-Odhiambo 1991, 305).

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